We announce with great sadness that the President of CCI Luxembourg belge, Mr André Roiseux, passed away this weekend due to the coronavirus. All our thoughts go out to his family, his loved ones and colleagues.
The Chamber farewell message is available here, in French.
What are the obligations for employers? What is the expected impact on my field of activity? How can I ensure the safety of my employees? Who can I contact if I have questions?
The coronavirus epidemic and the measures taken to contain it can have serious consequences for the Belgian economy. The Belgian Chambers of Commerce are joining forces with the public authorities and are informing you about the current situation by making several web pages available to you.
You can find answers to frequently asked questions about coronavirus as well as practical information on measures taken to help companies in Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels.
If these information pages do not answer a specific question, or if you would like to receive more specific details, please contact your chamber of commerce.
Finally, do not hesitate to visit https://www.info-coronavirus.be/en/ for more general information.
Various telephone numbers are available to answer your questions:
DigiChambers is the online application with which the Belgian Chambers of Commerce issue non-preferential certificates of origin on behalf of the FPS Economy. A certificate of origin confirms the place where the goods were produced and is requested upon import by the customs authorities of e.g. Russia, Turkey and the Gulf countries. In a globalized economy where production chains extend over several countries, determining the exact origin of a product is not always an easy task. However, chambers of commerce work closely with companies and know their production processes, which puts them in a good position to verify this origin. This is why, in most countries, the government has entrusted the issuing of certificates of origin to chambers of commerce. This is also the case in Belgium, where the chambers issue more than 400,000 certificates per year.
The first version of DigiChambers dates from 2009. At that time, the Belgian chambers were a forerunner in the history of digitization and were supported in this by the FPS Economy and recognized by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). DigiChambers has always succeeded in maintaining its leading position by constantly adding new functionalities and integrating with companies’ ERP systems. “However, it is not possible to modify an existing application indefinitely, which is why the time had come for a thorough overhaul of DigiChambers. We spent the necessary time, discussed with all parties involved and were guided by Deloitte in determining the requirements of DigiChambers 2.0 and in choosing the developer,” says Wouter Van Gulck, General Manager of the Federation of Belgian Chambers of Commerce, which coordinates the issuing of certificates of origin by the chambers and manages DigiChambers.
For the development of the new version of DigiChambers, D Soft, a software company based in Merelbeke, specialised in document management software and developer of the first version of DigiChambers, was again called upon. “The new version of DigiChambers is more intuitive and user-friendly,” says Christophe Coulie of the Federation, who closely followed the entire development process. “With a good API, we still want to facilitate communication with our customers’ systems and we have also designed DigiChambers in such a way that new technologies such as Blockchain can be integrated.”
DigiChambers is used every month by more than 1,800 companies. This represents almost 90% of the certificates of origin. The use of DigiChambers is voluntary for companies, but the ambition is indeed to move towards full digitisation.
Luxembourg Trade & Invest and the Luxembourg Chamber of commerce focus goals are to attract direct foreign investment to Luxembourg and to facilitate access to international markets for Luxembourg based companies. To reach these goals, they greatly value the support from the Chamber of Commerce network located around the world and they hope these resources will help you present Luxembourg to the world:
Do not hesitate to contact us for further information!
| Daniel Da Cruz | Trade & Invest |
| Edith Stein | Diana Rutledge | Luxembourg Chamber of commerce |
An ATA carnet allows its holder to temporarily import products into a country without paying import duties and taxes. For companies that participate in trade fairs or take material with them abroad, an ATA carnet is an important simplification: no hassle at customs, no payment of guarantees. ATA carnets are issued by the chambers of commerce, and they also guarantee that the goods will be exported back to Belgium. This guarantee is part of a larger set of agreements between the World Customs Organisation and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in Paris. It is the latter who made the ATA carnet digitization possible. Instead of having to travel with a set of documents that has to be stamped each time by the customs services of the importing and exporting countries, all information is now available via an app that customers can load on their smartphones.
Developing this app has been a work of several years and its deployment is currently in a pilot phase. Belgium is one of the five countries participating in this pilot phase. “For the Belgian Chambers of commerce, joining this ICC project was an obvious choice”, says Christophe Coulie of the Federation of Belgian Chambers of Commerce who coordinates the project in Belgium. “After all, we are fully committed to digitization for the sake of greater security and user-friendliness. With a digital carnet, you can follow the entire journey of a carnet in real time and anticipate possible problems.”
The Belgian Chambers of commerce issue more than 1,700 ATA carnets each year. The follow-up of these carnets is a time-consuming activity for both customs and chambers. And with the United Kingdom leaving the EU and becoming a third country, the number of ATA carnets will increase considerably: an online application that facilitates this follow-up is certainly not a luxury.
This Eurochambres report provides an overview of the obstacles faced by companies operating in the European single market. For Belgian companies, these obstacles are first and foremost the complexity of administrative procedures, followed by difficult access to information on the regulations in force and, finally, differences between national laws on products and services.
The companies that were polled also proposed a number of solutions to overcome these obstacles. While the drastic reduction of administrative formalities is the most common measure proposed, the provision of information on procedures and formalities in the different Member States on a common EU-wide portal follows directly. Another major simplification measure would be to make it possible to carry out as many procedures as possible online. In addition, the Commission and the Member States must work better together to implement and enforce European legislation.
A survey among Belgian Chambers of Commerce shows that their members are positive about the free trade agreements concluded by the European Union. Belgian companies are also generally better informed about the existence of a free trade agreement than their counterparts in other European countries. The main advantages they see are the reduction of import duties and better access for service providers.
But there are also important points of attention. There are insufficient accompanying measures to involve our SMEs in international production chains and to train or retrain employees. Furthermore, the free trade agreements rules of origin are often quite complex and differ from one agreement to another, which means that companies do not know them well enough and therefore do not make use of the tariff preferences.
This survey was part of a larger survey by EUROCHAMBRES and by the Committee of the Regions. The full results, findings and recommendations of this study can be found here.
